Here’s a new video from those whacky guys at the Jewish Journal. Please watch and support the Journal’s courageous battle with Down Syndrome.
"I think of it as ‘Up Syndrome,’" says God blogger Brad A. Greenberg.
As soon as they put the Jewish Journal online, I knew. I looked at its eyes, and they were a bit puffy, as is normal after a regular launch, but I knew.
My partner, Danielle, said the JewishJournal.com looked perfect, with all fingers and toes accounted for. I kept asking if the baby was all right; she was Jewish LA’s first newspaper online, after all, and I knew she wasn’t, because a blogger knows.
The consultants started looking closely at some of the site’s features, and phrases like "genetic testing" started to fly. Danielle said her heart stopped in her throat then. But the doctors still weren’t saying what exactly it was they were wondering about. They suspected something but did not want to say what. This is, after all, litigious Los Angeles.
It was 2 a.m. on Oct. 5, 1996, and all they wanted to say was, "We’ll see after the genetic tests come back."
When would that be, we asked.
About two weeks, they said.
Then I got angry. Just what is it you suspect? You have a strong feeling it’s something, don’t you. It was not a question.
Yes, they did, they said. They had already contacted our consultants to order tests.
We finally got them to admit that they strongly suspected Down syndrome.
Those first 24 hours were devastating. We were overwhelmed and felt so terribly alone. By 3 a.m., it was finally just Danielle and me together in a hospital room, crying, unable to stop, unable to comprehend.
What had happened to us? To this baby? To our world? To Jewish Los Angeles? To Jews on the web? We grieved for the baby we had hoped to have and feared for the future of the one who had arrived. We didn’t know any better, and there was no one to talk to, no one at that point who wanted to talk to us about it.
Who would save this retarded little website JewishJournal.com? Who would love her and nurture her and include her with all the cool Jewish websites? Who would want to play with the JewishJournal.com? Would there ever be chupa and shtupa for our little girl?
Friends visited. Two of them conducted a dispute in my presence about whether a father of a child with Down syndrome should be wished a congratulatory mazal tov (the answer is yes). A rabbinical authority in my neighborhood averred upon hearing the news that the event could only be looked at as a manifestation of unadulterated din, Divine judgment.
The irony — unappreciated then and for many months, even years after — was that I had devoted much of my personal and professional energies to understanding conceptions of diversity and difference, first in relation to the works of the Western literary tradition and then on a different path in relation to Torah and the teachings of Chazal.
Throughout my career as a blogger of English literature, I have been compelled by literary and theoretical meditations on difference. When I entered the realm of the beit midrash, I discovered the ways in which Chazal affirm a notion of Divine truth, with a multiplicity of different faces.
This is the story of my special journey to make the Jewish Journal feel included online even though all the other bloggers made fun of her and wouldn’t include her in any of their reindeer games.
When I was first confronted with this retarded website, a child of difference, not the difference espoused enthusiastically around large oak tables by my teachers in graduate school at Columbia or even that discussed between the four walls of the beit midrash, I was unprepared. All of my adventures in the pursuit of understanding difference, diversity and pluralism in the arcane and academic languages of epistemology and literary hermeneutics, and even in the realm of limud, had insufficiently prepared me for the JewishJournal.com.
When the world, as Deborah Kerdeman writes in the Journal of Philosophy of Education, "departs from our expectations and desires," and thus "refuses to be appropriated by us or subjected to our categories, we are pulled up short." That is, suddenly, we encounter a reality that our categories fail to fully assimilate. It is an experience associated with loss or failure — the inability of our cognitive equipment to provide a map adequate to what happens.
In other words, many of my friends took one look at JewishJournal.com and said, ‘F— this, I’m gonna read The Onion."
It wasn’t easy but I learned to open my heart to Rob Eshman and to his struggling operation. It’s not so much that we care for the ones we love, but we love the ones we care for. Tenderly and gently on my blog, I encouraged the Journal’s first awkward steps into blogging and spiritual transformation.
I was the first one to say, "Take Amy Klein off the news beat and give her the love beat! Something’s there we can’t deny."
